Hacker News Reader

> If someone has a lot to contribute but it never happens because their attitude sucks, that's on them. It's not on us to enable them.

It's not on you, maybe, but I'd be willing to put up with somebody's shit if they get the job done. And especially then if no one else has gotten it done so far.

Einstein bonked his cousin. And postulated the Theories of Relativity. Yeah, you'd think he could've thought of a better name.

I care about results, if someone's nice, that's a bonus. But don't deny the fact either, that some people will be nice because they need to hide an incompetence. I know, and they know, if you have the results, that that is the most important thing, being nice is optional. Not being nice also does not imply being rude, just neutral, by the way.

EDIT: And as a German, I'm intrinsically aware of the stereotype that we're often labelled as "rude", when we're actually being direct. So, who's at fault here? No one is, but we'd all go a long way to take a step back and realize, what's actually going on.

EDIT2: And I also often have to put up with the reverse of this, people who are so goddamned nice, I can't be mad at them for any longer than a few seconds, but basically can't get shit done. As an employee who often had to clean-up after others, I often got pissed at this, but fortunately, that's no longer my case.

And someone who’s great but an ass/racist/sexist could push out, deter, and marginalize geniuses. We do not have a deficit of people able to do wonderful things. We do not have to tolerate terrible people to get results.

You know what, I agree with you on that (at least concerning racism/sexism). But when it comes to "ass(holes)" and other "terrible people", as we can see from the whole RMS debacle, most people are unreliable and incapable of correctly identifying those terrible people.

I should've been more precise in this: Seemingly terrible people deserve an accurate evaluation that does not rely on "feelings" or the lynch-mob.

Definitions of an "ass(hole)" are pretty subjective, and the tolerances here vary far greater than those that are racist or sexist. You shouldn't mix them up.

That's fair and it is subjective - but I think it's pretty simple to come up with an "Employee Bill of Rights" that can enumerate "inalienable" rights for your employees, e.g. the right respectful communication (aka not being shouted at) etc. The internet is full of them.

This is, of course, different from being blunt, quiet, or other sorts of personality quirks people can associate negatively with. But I would say the line between proper and improper workplace behavior is more defined than people think.

I think the fear you are bringing up is the slippery slope into people being fearful of every interaction, but that will always need to be managed just like privacy and security and there will never be a one size fits all. But there certainly can be some pretty simple baselines established. Unions do it all the time - to varying degrees of success.

> We do not have to tolerate terrible people to get results.

You are totally correct.

I see no reason to tolerate people that go around lying and digging dirt in order to defame people...

I also see no reason to tolerate people that blindly jump on rumours in order to push their political goals.

I definitively see no reason to tolerate people that seek to erode principles of justice on which our society is founded.

His "social interactions compiler" or the SIC thrown warnings for years but he and everybody around him choose to silence these warnings instead of fixing them.

Now he had an error. The error that doesn't make sense to him but obviously the SIC is not happy but instead of trying to dig into his algorithms they try to argue with the compiler.

Good luck with that.

> You don't get X good thing without Y bad behaviour

Happens in the corporate world all the time though, was Microsoft ever really punished (beyond a wrist slap) for it's antitrust? Steve Jobs was notoriously a pedantic asshole, who gets to punish that?

I think the word "toxic" (people/places/cultures) is becoming vague and overused to the point of becoming the new badspeak - Can we just dismiss Stallman as "toxic"? Is the lynch-mob/fact-poor culture attacking Stallman not also "toxic"?

> You don't get X good thing without Y bad behaviour.

Consider the following: Humans have limited capacity, thus time, money and energy spent limiting Y inhibits resources available to creating X.

While life is short, it is long enough that people can learn not to be assholes / jerks IMHO:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_No_Asshole_Rule

* https://hbr.org/2007/03/why-i-wrote-the-no-asshole-rule

* https://www.td.org/insights/dont-tolerate-brilliant-jerks

* https://www.inc.com/jim-schleckser/why-netflix-doesn-t-toler...

Taking a closer look at "The No Asshole Rule", I'd say it's an opinion piece, and it runs the risk of enforcing something like Newspeak and a conformist atmosphere.

They argue with a single example of how getting rid of a salesman at a company, who was an asshole, but had great results, that the following year, the company's revenue went up (correlation does not imply causation). Then, OTOH, they argue that every company needs a "token asshole" citing Steve Jobs as an example (in direct contradiction to the previous cited example).

On the whole, there doesn't seem to be enough scientific evidence to support the anti-asshole sentiment, just a bunch of opinions, hamstrung with authoritative arguments.

I'd refer again to the drill sergeant as a hyperbole as to why some people are assholes, and how it serves the greater good in defiance to the brunt of people having to accept such assholery.

1) There's a reason drill sergeants aren't exactly known to be friendly...

2) Not all people have an easy time learning not to be an asshole (and some literally can't). Thus, the resource-cost varies.

3) If one is just blunt, people can often misinterpret that as being an asshole. But factually, the blunt person is just blunt, and the "victim" is just disgruntled, which, at least in my opinion, makes the "victim" the actual asshole if he decides to judge the blunt person because of that.

There are certainly many assholes who deserve to be criticized, but we should allow the benefit of doubt to all parties first.

It’s a fine line between blunt and asshole. To pull off being blunt you need some additional empathy and social grace. The other person has to feel that your blunt but they respect it. Otherwise you’ll be seen as an asshole. Assholery really is in the eyes and ears of the beholder.

In many scenarios the most important skill you can have is the ability to ignore common sense. The drawback of that ability is that people without common sense are very often seen as assholes since most of our social fabric is based on mutual common sense.

Or in other words, a person who is brilliant thanks to his lack of common sense would not have been brilliant if he had common sense. And convincing a person without common sense that learning common sense would be good for him is very hard, most likely he will just ignore it like he did all other common sense things he have been told to do in his life. Therefore it is inevitable that asshole leaders who lack common sense will continue to appear and thrive, because those with common sense can't do the job.

So apsies are just jerks? right.

I can't see how packaging insults as a solution improves anything.

Consider the following: the existence and promotion of Y bad behaviour reduces the ability and willingness of humans to contribute to creating X, and the return of investment of time, money and energy spent in limiting Y results in more overall time, money and energy available to create X.

Better yet, consider the following: things are more complicated that ridiculous oversimplification.

Convenient, to be able to decide, when and where to apply Occam's Razor.